White Woman Asks White Supremacists: ‘What Is Wrong With You?’

Jonna Ramey, a sculptor based in Salt Lake City, may be white. But she sure doesn’t understand white supremacists.

Ramey, 67, recently told The Washington Post that she was horrified by last month’s fatal events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and white nationalists gathered for a “Unite the Right” rally.

“I was furious, and felt like as a white person, I had to speak out about white bigotry,” Ramey told the Post. “It was important, I thought, for a white person to say something.”

Ramey put her thoughts on paper and sent a letter to The Salt Lake Tribune, which ran it under the headline “Letter of the week: What is wrong with you, white supremacists?” (The letter appeared in print on Aug. 20 and was published online on Aug. 26.)

The letter begins:

I am a 67-year-old American white woman. My parents enlisted in World War II to fight fascism. They both served; my mother was a nurse, my father navigated bombers. They lost friends in that bloody war so that all the world could be free of fascism. They did not fight so that some white people could claim supremacy or that Nazis could openly walk the streets of America.

White person to white supremacist person: What is wrong with you?

Ramey then notes that people of European descent “are doing just fine in the world,” and points out that other communities simply “want a piece of the pie. They work for it, strive for it and earn it.”

She also offers this lovely jab:

“By the way, the world won the war against Nazi fascism in the 1940s, just as America won the war against the Confederacy in the 1860s. Aligning with two lost causes just labels you as profound losers.”